War can scar a city as permanently as its people, and Sarajevo wears its legacy of sorrow on its streets. The city’s largest central green space, the rather literally named Veliki Park [Great Park], is located about a five-minute walk from the eternal flame that burns for those who died during World War II, and in the park itself are several reminders of the more recent Bosnian War of the 1990s, when the city was under siege by Serbian forces for nearly four years. The most somber of Veliki’s monuments is a fountain emblazoned with the words “Spomen obilježje ubijenoj djeci opkoljenog Sarajeva,” meaning Memorial to the Murdered Children of Besieged Sarajevo, which commemorates the nearly 1,500 children killed by snipers and mortar fire between April 5, 1992, and February 29, 1996.
When I last visited Sarajevo in the spring of 2024, another monument had been installed on the square in front of the city’s hundred-year-old National Theatre, a few blocks southeast of Veliki. “Svaki Sat 9 Nevinih,” or Every Hour 9 Innocents, is a plea to stop the killing in Gaza, and features a giant brown teddy bear that slumps, wounded and bloodstained, atop a squat black plywood pedestal. Surrounding the bear are dozens of smaller stuffed animals, several bouquets of withered flowers, and a few random toys, including a Barbie wearing a short dress and go-go boots, her permanently bent arms reaching toward the sky. The text of the monument’s plaque, written in Bosnian and English, reads, in part: “At the heart of this installation lies a story of the loss of childhood innocence due to the terrible consequences of war. A child’s teddy bear, once a symbol of joy and carefree times, now becomes a witness to suffering and the loss of innocent lives. The wounded form not only depicts physical destruction, but also the deep emotional trauma that permeates every moment of the lives of children affected by war and atrocities.”
The horrifying loss of innocent lives in places like 1990s Sarajevo or present-day Gaza, where the UN estimates more than 13,000 Palestinian children were killed in the first year of Israel’s ongoing war, can make it difficult to remain cognizant of the more intangible consequences of war, of the “deep emotional trauma” haunting children who survive growing up in war zones that are statistically less deadly. But those scars hold stories as well, and it is that internalized trauma—and how it is expressed—that Croatian author Maša Kolanović explores in her 2008 debut, Sloboština Barbie. The novel takes its original name from the southern Novo Zagreb neighborhood where its unnamed tween narrator lives, which is perhaps why it has been titled Underground Barbie in Ena Selimović’s new English-language translation. Set over several months at the end of 1991, the real-world horrors of the War of Independence, as Croatians call the Balkan wars spawned by the breakup of Yugoslavia, intrude in increasingly disturbing ways upon the imaginary Barbie World where the young girl and her friends try to escape from the forces weighing down on Sloboština.
Few dates appear in the novel, but its general timeline would be familiar to Croatians. The story begins around October 7, 1991, when Yugoslav air forces bombed Gornji Grad, the area of central Zagreb where the Croatian government is headquartered. The attack would turn out to be the only time that bombs would fall within Zagreb proper until 1995, but the city’s residents had no way of knowing that at the time. All they knew was that international pressure had failed to enable the peaceful secession of Croatia from Yugoslavia. The war was, as the novel’s narrator says, no less frightening for its predictability: “All roads had been leading to this moment, which, albeit anticipated, was no less horrifying.” Months of repeatedly abandoned ceasefires had only served to allow the combatants to dig in their positions. Along the Adriatic coast, Serbian-controlled Yugoslav forces were blockading Dubrovnik. In the east, they were attacking Vukovar, which Croatia defended with the only military it had at the time, national guardsmen and civilian volunteers. And closer to Zagreb, the breakaway Serbian republic of Krajina was dug in along frontlines that would eventually reach some thirty to fifty miles from the capital, the sounds of fighting audible on the wind to those living in Sloboština. Even right next door, less than a mile from the narrator’s building and fully within the city limits of Zagreb, the Marshal Tito barracks continued to house a contingent of the Yugoslav People’s Army that was now openly at war with Croatia.
Kolanović does an excellent job conveying the way her young narrator saw everyday life get “repackaged” in the months after Croatia first declared its independence in June, following an overwhelmingly successful May referendum. Comrades became Misters or Misses. Tito’s portrait was replaced by the Croatian coat of arms. And, more forebodingly, her friends “with newly out-of-fashion names—Saša, Bojan, and Boro—moved away overnight.” When the bombs fall on October 7, the families in the narrator’s building prepare for potential evacuation, and the girl readies her “most prized portable property” with a combination of a grown-up’s awareness of the potential terrors ahead and a child’s unique way of assessing value. “Should our building be struck by a bomb and reduced to ashes, spewing flames and black smoke, life would still be worth living if my Barbie remained whole, wearing her flashy little pink outfit with its tiny fluorescent lemons, pineapples, and bananas; her pink-and-green watermelon-shaped purse; her sunglasses; and the open-toe heels that completed the look.”
The Barbies in the novel come in many varieties, from “truly valuable” Mattel imports mailed from relatives abroad to knock-off “wannabes” with “stupid names, puffy cheeks, unbendable knees, poorly sewn clothes, and catastrophic shoes.” While the narrator owns three authentic Barbies and a Skipper, Barbie’s younger sister, she supplements genuine accessories with repurposed items that are at hand. The tub where her grandmother soaks her feet becomes a pool; a red Converse All Star shoe doubles as a Ferrari. Most of the narrator’s playmates—Svjetlana, Ana M., Ana P., Dea, Tea, and a boy named Borna—have fairly interchangeable Barbies, Skippers, or Kens, with the critical exception of Svjetlana’s Ken doll, who is rechristened Dr. Kajfeš after a run-in with her two-year-old cousin.
The narrator is aware, more than many adults might be, that the attack on Svjetlana’s toy caused damage not just to the doll itself, but to its owner, writing that “something had broken in our Svjetlana.” Based solely on physical description, Kajfeš, who lost an eye and had the fingers on his right hand “wrecked,” might evoke Kate McKinnon’s whimsical Weird Barbie from Greta Gerwig’s 2023 blockbuster Barbie, but Svjetlana’s “most abhorrent Ken” is often a lewd, aggressive madman, a figure who comes to embody much of the real-world trauma the kids are struggling to process, whether it be derived from misogyny, marital infidelity, or the war. Kajfeš enters the story by memorably suggesting to Dea’s Barbie that she “should screw Bald Baby, then grab her wig in the middle of sex and put it on [her] head!” He only gets more abusive from there. At one point he talks of “brutally [raping]” Barbies multiple times. He leers at Borna’s “underage Skipper” while chaperoning a ski trip, preferring the boy’s “little blonde [nymph]” to the “middle-aged hags in the teachers’ lounge.” And toward the end of the novel, when Dea’s parents are presumed to be having marital troubles, her Barbie enlists the help of “Detective Kajfeš” to seek out the mistresses of her Barbie’s husband, women who ultimately turn up headless in a mass grave. Because kids can be so much more malleable than adults, the narrator and her friends take Kajfeš’s actions in stride, aware of what Svjetlana and they themselves are going through. The Barbies even “somehow, and only under certain circumstances, secretly [revel] in this newly forged and oddly sexy identity” of Kajfeš.
When Vukovar falls to Serbian forces on November 18, 1991, Kajfeš makes a kind of Frankenbride—swapping heads with “a semicrushed fake Barbie that Svjetlana had found god knows where”—and the two go on a murder spree. (The defeat was Croatia’s most significant urban loss during the war, with the Yugoslav military’s months-long bombardment leveling the city and driving out its entire non-Serb population, though Croatia would regain control of the city in 1998.) But Kajfeš can also be inspiring, as when the Sloboština children are forced to play with refugees from Lika, Slavonia, and Dubrovnik, and he leads everyone in singing the patriotic “Moja domovina,” before emceeing a Eurovision-style contest for the motley group of Barbies and other figurines, including He-Man and Skeletor, brought by the children forced to flee their homes.
The narrator’s life outside of Barbie World informs her playtime, and the war increasingly crops up as the novel goes on. Local television is subsumed by the war, in a “coma” of nothing but news, so the narrator savors the frivolous respite provided by candy commercials on the German satellite channel. Newspaper headlines are reprinted in the novel and woven into the Barbie World narrative, part of Kajfeš’s reality as well as that of the Sloboština kids. And Kolanović intersperses sketches throughout the text: stick figures that appear merely childlike at a glance but are often horrific, depicting screaming characters in peril. When the narrator and her friends occasionally wander away from the relative safety of Sloboština, they quickly retreat into their imaginary world whenever they stop to interact with others. Her older brother, by contrast, can’t keep his reaction to the war inside his head. He makes a satirical remix of an interview with a Serbian leader from Krajina, and later gets in trouble after trespassing on the Marshal Tito barracks. Given all that is going on around them, the narrator’s parents, who are largely absent from the narrative, are understandably on edge when they do appear, as when her mom snaps at her while driving her to vocal lessons.
Underground Barbie could have benefitted from a more robust editing process. A news story goes “viral” at one point, which was not possible in 1991, and the text retains clunky English phrases, such as “constituted an adultery” or “I stormed my brain,” as well as nonsensical terms like “semifledged” or “pop deflation.” These questionable renderings are offset by original coinages that lend an inferable flair to the English version despite their unfamiliarity: phrases like “sexy-flexy outfit” or “before you could say ‘cakes’,” which is a literal rendering of the Croatian idiom “dok si reko keks.”
The war between Croats and Serbs drags on long past 1991, but those years are only summarized in the novel, as the residents of Zagreb adjust to the new normal of fighting a more distant war, burying their trauma deep enough to continue living their daily lives. When the war ends, so does the narrator’s childhood: “the time had come to stop playing with our Barbies.” Her friends start to move away, and she is left to reflect on the fact that “everything in Barbie World was ‘pretend,’ but some things were more real than others.” That concluding turn of phrase—“more real,” instead of the anticipated parallel “more pretend”—feels especially powerful. It emphasizes the fact that there is no escape from reality, even for children able to freely access the full power of their imaginations. No matter how far underground the trauma of growing up during a war gets buried, it will never go away. But the survivors still deserve a monument to their memories, and Kolanović’s novel provides a fitting one.
Copyright © 2025 by Cory Oldweiler. All rights reserved.
